Dog Jail

I've written about our special dog before. How we found her in the woods and she's getting a little more normal and all of that. Well, she's getting less normal again. It seems that leaving a dog with abandonment issues alone for a week is one way to blow a few circuits in her head.

High security, but only here.

See, you just can't take a dog to Disney. I guess you could if it was a service dog, but Patty is more of an anti-service dog. It's not like we totally abandoned her though, we had a really nice responsible neighborhood girl come over every day and make sure she had food and water and was doing well. They know each other and they're happy to see each other and Patty had a nice warm bed in the garage and everything. We came home and she was fat and happy. Or so we thought.
She didn't even try to get out of the yard the whole time we were gone. I assume she just laid in the garage and contemplated her bleak future alone. After we got back though, she was so happy that she was determined to never let us go away again. Ever. If we left the yard, she was leaving the yard. First it was by mashing the gate open with her body. Then it was through a weak patch between our fence and the neighbors fence. Then it was by tearing off an attachment of the fence to the gate and prying the fence out of the way. Then it was back to the patch again. Over it. Around it. Under it. Every time I fixed some part of it she poked and prodded and dug until she could get out.
She didn't stay out. She just worked and worked and worked to get out, did whatever looking around she could do, and came back in to wait for us. Oh, she occasionally went and found something dead to roll in, but she wasn't running away (unfortunately) she was just getting out. I finally had to cut the old patch out of the corner and doggy proof it. I bought four, two foot long pieces of rebar and pounded them halfway into the ground about three inches apart. Then I cut up some old leftover wire from making the guinea coop and wired a patch in. I also used wire to tie it to the rebar. I also purposely left all of the pokey ends of the wire sticking out to deter her from digging at it. After two days I had to get out more wire and wire the neighbors fence to our pole to stop up gap about two inches wide that she was still managing to squeeze her body though.
She's been working at the corner for a few days now and I think I've stopped her. The weird thing about all of this is that there are about 50 other places she could get out if she tried. Failing that, she could simply climb or jump over the fence, it's lower that the kennel that she broke out of this summer. This isn't about escaping as much as it's about dealing with her mental illness. She's obsessed with getting out and looking for us, but her brain is so broken that she's unable to use any problem solving skills to do it. She can only see the gate or the corner as possible escape routes, she seems to be blind to the whole rest of the yard.
I'm hoping that if we can keep her in the yard for a few weeks the episodes she's having will wane. She'll somehow forget that we left that one time and start to believe that when we leave we'll come back. Perhaps some of those broken circuits will heal and she'll move back toward normal. Maybe.